No Vivien, no Waste Land.
It's been said before, but it's said again in this review of col. 4 of the letters:
In a rare newspaper interview in 1994, Valerie Eliot said that her
husband wrote The Waste Land because Vivian made him suffer. “We owe the poem
to her, no question: he wouldn’t have written it if she hadn’t given him such
hell.” And in oblique confirmation of this claim, in a letter included here,
discussing The Waste Land with E M Forster on August 10 1929, Eliot says: “You
exaggerate the importance of the War… The Waste Land might have been just the
same without the War.” It is perhaps not surprising that during the last
near-decade of Eliot’s life when his second marriage gave him unprecedented
happiness that his creative output diminished accordingly.